Articles by Doc Mike Finnley

This is an unintentional detour for our little course. I didn’t plan to investigate the factorial function in so much detail, but it came about quite by accident (or stupidity) as we’ll see in later [more…]

Here we’ll look at some more probability calculations before moving on to permutations, combinations and the binomial theorem. More Probability… If you recall from the last part, we used set notation to describe a general [more…]

So far, we’ve looked at sets and how they contain information that we wish to count in some way. How the power set \(\wp(S)\) can count all of the possible sub-sets of a given set [more…]

Subsets Let’s suppose that set \(S\) contains a full deck of playing cards. Therefore, \(|S|=52\). We can split the cards into four suits: \(♠,♣,♥,♦\). Let’s make a set \(T\) that contains only the clubs suit [more…]

Before we can start to solve some counting problems we need to know a little of combinatorics’ notation. Luckily, a few simple rules should get us started. Don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense, that [more…]